Abstract
This paper argues that Ah!lam Mustaghanami’s novel Dhakirat al-jasad (Memories of the Flesh)
enacts a break with Algeria’s Francophone literary past, multiply staging its affiliation with the
Arabic language. !e novel positions itself as part of an Algerian linguistic drama that, once
translated into French as Mémoires de la chair, is problematically obscured. !e press reviews of
the novel’s French translation serve to reveal, furthermore, that a French readership’s familiarity
with the significant corpus of Francophone Algerian literature mutes the legibility of the Algerian
linguistic drama that Mustaghanami’s novel articulates in the Arabic original.